[Footnote 278:  It was revived in 1707, by Wanley, the librarian to the Earl of Oxford, who composed its rules; he was joined by Bagford, Elstob, Holmes (keeper of the Tower records), Maddox, Stukely, and Vertue the engraver.  They met at the Devil Tavern, Fleet-street, and afterwards in rooms of their own in Chancery-lane.  They ultimately removed to apartments granted them in Somerset House by George III., where they still remain.]

[Footnote 279:  It was said of Prynne, and his custom of quoting authorities by hundreds in the margins of his books to corroborate what he said in the text, that “he always had his wits beside him in the margin, to be beside his wits in the text.”  This jest is Milton’s.]

[Footnote 280:  Southey says—­“A quotation may be likened to a text on which a sermon is preached.”]

[Footnote 281:  Hone had this faculty in a large degree, and one of his best political satires, the “Political Showman at Home,” is entirely made out of quotations from older authors applicable to the real or fancied characteristics of the politicians he satirized.]

[Footnote 282:  In MS. Bib.  Reg. inter lat.  No. 2447, p. 134.]

[Footnote 283:  In the recent edition of Dante, by Romanis, in four volumes, quarto, the last preserves the “Vision of Alberico,” and a strange correspondence on its publication; the resemblances in numerous passages are pointed out.  It is curious to observe that the good Catholic Abbate Cancellieri, at first maintained the authenticity of the Vision, by alleging that similar revelations have not been unusual!—­the Cavaliere Gherardi Rossi attacked the whole as the crude legend of a boy who was only made the instrument of the monks, and was either a liar or a parrot!  We may express our astonishment that, at the present day, a subject of mere literary inquiry should have been involved with “the faith of the Roman church.”  Cancellieri becomes at length submissive to the lively attacks of Rossi; and the editor gravely adds his “conclusion,” which had nearly concluded nothing!  He discovers pictures, sculptures, and a mystery acted, as well as Visions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from which he imagines the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso owe their first conception.  The originality of Dante, however, is maintained on a right principle; that the poet only employed the ideas and the materials which is found in his own country and his own times.]

[Footnote 284:  Michelet, in his “Life of Luther,” says the Spanish soldiers mocked and loaded him with insults, on the evening of his last examination before the Diet at Worms, on his leaving the town-hall to return to his hostelry:  he ceased to employ arguments after this, and when next day the archbishop of Treves wished to renew them, he replied in the language of Scripture, “If this work be of men, it will come to nought, but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.”]